RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama the triple-loser…

Obama is delusional. He told a group from the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative that he is proudest of three accomplishments: 1) the economic recovery, 2) Obamacare, and 3) his foreign policy.

Narcissism is narcissism. It’s egotism that loves the reflection of its own ego. But when it spills over into the president’s warped perception of reality and the reality of the world depends on his clarity, then he, our president, has endangered the world.

Boasting about accomplishments that he has not achieved is mild psychosis with possible deleterious results. Taking credit for three disasters is a failure to perceive the results of his actions.

We owe so much to the Hellenic culture of the ancients, not least the simple moral lessons of their fables and epics. Somehow, modern Greeks opted to ignore the advice their forebears bequeathed to all humanity. If only they had stopped their ears against the siren song of the spendthrift left.

Greece is an amazing country with history to match. The rest of the world owes Greeks big-time for their bequest of immortal literature, theatre, art, democracy, science, medicine, philosophy, travel, the alphabet. At the risk of sounding like the heroine’s father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the fact is that a great many things in our modern lives have been borrowed or adapted from the Greeks. Hellenic culture is regarded as one of the three foundation stones of Western civilisation, the trifecta being Jewish monotheism, Roman law and Greek democracy. That legacy highlights Greek culture’s contribution to the way we live, think and behave. Another gift is the lessons we ought to draw from Greece’s default on the country’s debt.

In 1970, Israel’s power projection forced a rollback of the Soviet-backed Syrian invasion of pro-US Jordan. The Syrian invasion aimed at toppling the Hashemite regime, and then surging into Saudi Arabia, which would have given the USSR a dramatic triumph, while devastating US economic and military interests.

In the 1967 War, Israel obliterated the Egyptian military, aborting an attempt by the pro-Soviet Egypt to topple the pro-US Arab oil-producing regimes.

In 2015, Israel is the only stable, reliable, predictable, capable, democratic and unconditional ally of the US.

The new leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula surfaced in an audio message today to call on Muslims to conduct global jihad, with a specific order to “direct and gather your arrows and swords against” the United States.

AQAP’s commander of military operations, Qasim al-Rimi, seamlessly moved into the top spot after an airstrike killed Nasir al-Wuhayshi in a June airstrike.

Rimi eulogized Wuhayshi in the recording from AQAP’s al-Malahem Media Foundation and renewed his allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

It’s day one here at Freedom Fest and one of the most interesting speakers at the event is Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.

Mackey, if you don’t know, is a libertarian and the author of the book Conscious Capitalism. He is a passionate believer in the free market, telling the audience “economic freedom has lifted humanity out of the dirt.”

I think most people just assume he is a granola-type hippy.

Critical Studies’ end products will be tribes of dependent, interchangeable, obedient, compliant manqués, ever-ready to do the State’s bidding.

As you leave your Critical Literary Studies class to trudge wearily down the hall to your Critical Legal Studies class, your head may be spinning with a kaleidoscope of disconnected images, feelings, huge swathes of “text,” and memory of the agony of trying to second-guess your instructor about what anything means.

You were particularly confused about why the instructor claimed that there was no question that Nick Carraway’s obsession with Jay Gatsby was actually a disguised and coded homosexual fascination with the millionaire in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Carraway’s affair with Jordan Baker, the female golfer character, was merely a substitute proxy relationship. The air-headed Daisy Buchanan served as a convenient transition point and a “false focal nexus,” as did Myrtle Wilson, the local garage owner’s cuckolding wife. All the signifiers and signifieds in the “text” say so. Your homework assignment is to pinpoint and discuss seven of them in a paper due by the end of the week.

Former President Jimmy Carter has tipped his hat toward Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as the liberal standard-bearer seeking the Democratic nomination — but concedes that “stupid” campaign finance laws will hand victory to Hillary Clinton.

Carter told PBS that “more inherently” Sanders and Elizabeth Warren speak better on the issue of income inequality.

“The senator was in the forefront of saying equality and doing away with discrimination economically, constraining Wall Street, and doing away with the domination that the rich people now have over the political system,” Carter said of the Massachusetts Democrat.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said he was the only Republican that liked Lisa Jackson, President Obama’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, because she “could not tell a lie.”

“You don’t fit in this administration unless you can lie,” Inhofe, chairman of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works, said at the Heritage Foundation.

Inhofe recalled Jackson saying “no” when he asked if the EPA pursuing cap and trade through regulations would lower CO2 emissions worldwide. “Climategate” occurred after their conversation, which stalled widespread federal action on carbon at the time.

Throughout a bombing-and-murder campaign lasting three decades, the BBC never referred to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as the “so-called IRA.” If you flatten ISIS’s military, the strong-horse appeal of ISIS would simply go away. If there is nothing to join, no one can join it.

Cameron’s and Obama’s tactic is to deny something that Muslims and non-Muslims can easily see and find out for themselves: that ISIS has a lot to do with Islam — the worst possible version, obviously, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, but a version of Islam nevertheless.

A few days after the massacre of 30 British subjects on a Tunisian beach, the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, used an interview on the BBC to berate the broadcaster and others for using the term “Islamic State.” Mr. Cameron’s suggestion was that the broadcaster should either refer to the “so-called Islamic State,” use the acronym “ISIL,” or adopt the Arabic term, “Daesh.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is now notorious for his inflammatory comments on Israeli Arabs during the 2015 elections • But a look at his actual policy record on the issue from 2009 until today reveals a different picture, one which belies his media image as a “racist” firebrand • Prof. Robert Cherry shows how what politicians do is often more important than what they say.

If there is one thing liberal pundits in Israel and America seem to agree on, it’s that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu doesn’t like Israeli Arabs and wishes them harm. The outcry over his remarks—ill-judged at the very least and inflammatory at worst—regarding Arab voters being brought in buses to vote against him helped cement this suspicion. But a close look at Netanyahu’s actual record on Israeli Arabs, as opposed to this or that public remark, reveals a very different story.

For a start, affirmative action policies initiated under Ehud Olmert were accelerated during the Netanyahu administration. These prioritized economic development, including allocating funds for joint industrial parks in Arab and Jewish towns. Subsidies helped firms hire Arab labor and expanded transportation infrastructure, which allowed Arabs to reach employment sites. These ventures were so successful that the government began setting up industrial parks and employment offices exclusively in Arab towns. In addition, the Israeli government developed a five-year plan for improving Arab education and established a special unit in the prime minister’s office to promote economic development in the Arab community.